Experiences with working from home

[George_Dodds]

Hi Folks

My role is going to be changing from full time onsite to part time working from home very soon.

I was wondering if anyone has any experience on with how this affected your day to day admin duties (obviously backups become a pain if you have to start relying on someone else to loads you tapes).

But i was more thinking about day to day monitoring, reports, etc.
At the moment it's all done via email alerts from the servers themselves as we have no monitoring software or are likely to get any.

Cheers

George

[Muthukumar_5]

Problem will come in the shape of,

1) network speed in your home :) (It is really big problem)
2) Getting guidance / help / support nearby
3) Distraction from personal things ;)

If you have setup scripts for monitoring and report then no problem at all. Try to tune first problem. Then you are happy always to say Working from home.

PS: Another problem .But to your thread now. It is possible to move your thread to ITRC Forums -> General :) ;)

--
Muthu

[Peter Godron]

George,
I worked from home for a short contract.
Being in the Uk, try to get best broadband speed your company will pay for.

Set a daily schedule of what you need to do and finish work as normal. Don't be tempted to work extra time, which you use to travel as work time. Keep your work/life balance.

Agree certain contact periods for people to call and use your lunch break to catch up with other people.
Workwise, your email system should need no changes.

[George_Dodds]

Network connection is ok i have 1 mb broadband

Guidance, lol i've been on my own for years.

Distractions, i'm building my own office area in the garage, so should keep them to a minimum.

As for thread placement i put it in HPUX general, as i need to hear from HPUX admins, to see if they have encountered any problems supporting their systems this way and if they managed to work more efficiently or have any tips :)

[Muthukumar_5]

Guidance, lol i've been on my own for years.
===>

kwel. If you are *great* techie guy. Here, if you are working from home then you may need to wait for data or input or answer from client side etc. Anyway allocate some time or meeting to have client knowledge (daily / weekly) basis.

Have official setup of printers / xerox / scanner for having hard copies. Setup proper backup system to maintain your system data(s).

--
Muthu

[Kent Ostby · Accepted solution]

George --

Part of it depends on your ability to focus.

Problems that I have seen from home:

1) networking goes down (for me this is DSL modem). This sometimes require phone company a day or more to fix so I end up driving into the office.

2) kids wander into the office and yell loudly while on phone with customer

3) wife says, "Since you're working from home today can you ....."

4) good book that I *almost* finished last night is sitting two feet from my desk.

The main things are:

a) have a plan if your PC dies or your network dies

b) have an isolated office that you can lock to keep wife/kids/cat out of

c) don't keep your personal projects in the same room (or at least not the ones that interest you)... if they have to be in the same room, keep them behind you out of the line of site.

[George_Dodds]

Thankfully i'll be on my own during the day.

I'm harassing them so i can take my desktop and laptop home.

I've got a 3g card for the laptop if the worst happens to my cable connection.

Number 3 made me laugh, i'm glad she works ;)

[Yogeeraj_1]

Hi George,

You should also look at security aspects. Here, a VPN solution would be ideal.

VPNs have become the logical solution for remote access connectivity. Deploying a remote access VPN enables corporations to reduce communications expenses by using the local dialup infrastructures of Internet Service Providers. At the same time, VPNs allow mobile workers, telecommuters, partners, and day extenders to take advantage of broadband connectivity. To fully realize the benefits of high-performance remote-access VPNs, a corporation must deploy a robust, highly available VPN solution, supporting both IPSec and WebVPN (clientless) capabilities.

see also:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/netsol/ns340/ns394/ns171/ns125/networking_solutions_sub_solution_home.html


hope this helps!
kind regards
yogeeraj

[George_Dodds]

we allready have a vpn allthough i will have to seriously look at general pc security.

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi again,

also beware of some remote operations that can cause large downtimes in cases of failures...

E.g. server restarts, database restarts, etc

hope this helps too!

kind regards
yogeeraj